


Illumination.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jedi Apprentice Series - Jude Watson & Dave Wolverton, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Jedi Temple, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Psychometry, Qui-Gon Jinn Lives, Tahl as Anakin's Master, Tahl lives, jedi order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25189195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: Tahl had only then become aware of her master’s presence behind her.  “A rare and precious thing,” Jocasta had murmured, and their eyes met.  Jocasta had gently taken the book from her hands.  “A book of endings.  One tale, told many ways, the narrative sometimes all but obscured by details.  It requires uncommon wisdom to find the true story underneath the surface.”
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Tahl, Bant Eerin & Tahl, Jocasta Nu & Tahl, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Tahl, Qui-Gon Jinn & Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn/Tahl (Star Wars), Tahl/Books
Comments: 51
Kudos: 133





	1. Chapter 1

**_then._ **

The year before she earned her knighthood, Tahl had been sent on an expedition with her master to recover the archives of an ancient temple almost buried beneath the snow-capped mountains of Alderaan. 

The Temple was on the verge of collapse underneath the mountains. Tahl and her master had worked silently to retrieve the collection, placing each volume in climate controlled containers. It had been midwinter in Aldera, and the air was frozen and still. Tahl’s boots had echoed through the strange, barren sanctum of the Temple, untouched for centuries; now only the dust swept aside from Master Jocasta’s long skirts was the only indication of life. 

The collection contained rare copies of texts inscribed by guardians of the Whills. The monks had spent centuries perfecting their illustration techniques, and the manuscripts had been lavishly decorated with art, little birds and vines growing up the margins, stars and planets spinning in cosmic circles across the footnotes, strange faces of beasts peering solemnly from behind the lettering, stylized faces of exotic fauna and patterns of flowers blooming here and there, outlined with flakes of argentium and diademic coal for a metallic sheen. It was in this collection that she had found the volume of fairy tales.

Tahl had reached up to retrieve the volume nestled under the eaves of a high shelf, and as her hand brushed its cracked leather cover, she had caught a sudden glimpse of a monk of the Whills. 

_An old man, with white hair and a sand-brown hand, lined with age but still steady, gently scratching flakes of argentium into the curliques of the printed letters on the page._

Her breath had hung in the air, clouded around the manuscript. She had never felt such a connection to anything before as she had when she had the vision of the monk gilding pages, and in a wild flash of insight, she realized the vision was of the Force, and that her life and this volume were bound together in some strange way.

Tahl had only then become aware of her master’s presence behind her. “A rare and precious thing,” Jocasta had murmured, and their eyes met. Jocasta had gently taken the book from her hands. “A book of endings. One tale, told many ways, the narrative sometimes all but obscured by details. It requires uncommon wisdom to find the true story underneath the surface.”

She had been enchanted by that volume of old Alderaanian fairy tales, carefully handwritten with dark red ink made from the native chinar trees, accessible only in the special collections room of the Temple archives under plates of transparisteel and low-intensity archival lighting. The volume was so old and delicate that the pages would crumble to dust from the wrong touch. But once it had been brought back to the Coruscant Temple, Tahl had poured over those stories until she could recite each tale from heart.

The stories had been collected centuries ago from the mountains north of Aldera, and some told of legendary princesses and princes with the power to change shape into wrinic-cats, and other stories told the legend of a vanishing moon that had risen every nightfall, until one night the moon had not appeared, never to be seen again, while other stories spoke of ancient thrantas so large that they could cover the snow caps of the mountains. 

There did not seem to be many similarities between the stories. No matter how Tahl studied the volume, trying to find the connection, she could not find the way in which they were related.

Her master had not quite understood her padawan’s fascination with the fairy tales, though Jocasta had exhibited tacit approval over Tahl’s interest in the linguistics of Old Alderaanian. The only one who had ever seemed close to understanding had been Qui-Gon, who could always be relied on to perceive what Tahl struggled to say. He would come to find her in the special collections room and sit with her for hours while she worked.

“They mean something to me, these stories,” Tahl tried to explain, and Qui-Gon had listened patiently. “It’s like a language I can’t quite understand. There’s more under the surface—translating the words is only the beginning of the mystery.”

She could feel Qui-Gon’s eyes follow around the room. And in that moment, she had first understood that there could be words written on a heart for which there is no translation.

* * *

**_now._ **

It has been many years since that mission to Alderaan, and the volume of fairy tales has never been far from her mind. She thinks of it still, its memory called up in certain situations. 

Tahl is sitting in the special collections room, sorting through the crates of a donated collection of artifacts, relics from the High Republic era, of the Jedi who had worked the waystations two hundred-odd years ago, when Jocasta comes to tell her what has occurred in Naboo. 

A whisper from the Force tells her this was nothing she nor anyone else could have sensed coming. More like layers of ink spread over paper, bleeding over each other: All possibilities, staining through the Force; some overlapping and darkening in places, others running off the paper in unexpected channels. 

And she understands that something has happened, the Force shivering in all its aspects, change spreading out through the galaxy in an intricate cascade of possibilities. 

A book of endings, Tahl thinks, and though she is sightless, she can still see the pages of chinar-red manuscript, wavering somewhat, as though viewed through warped glass.

* * *

Tahl can feel their presence in the Force before she steps into the halls of healing. Qui-Gon’s warm glow, dimmed now to a faint flicker of life, and Obi-Wan’s steady, luminous light, and an unfamiliar brilliance, like Coruscant’s sun has taken up residence in the next corridor over. 

She hears Obi-Wan climb to his feet as soon as she steps through the door. “Master Tahl—” he starts, and then she hears him swallow. 

She goes to him and smoothes her hands down his sturdy shoulders. The linen of his tunics catches on the calluses on her fingers, and an unfamiliar memory rises from the fabric— _Anakin’s tears, Anakin catching at these tunics in the middle of the night, calling for Qui-Gon and his mother_ — 

Tahl has always had a touch of psychometry, and though she can no longer see with her eyes, she might at times catch a glimpse through someone else’s. She catches another faint image of sandy hair and a tear-streaked face, then the memory fades away.

“Let me see you,” Tahl tells him, and Obi-Wan stands still and allows her to run her fingers over his cheek. She has never seen his face. They had not met until after she lost her sight on Melida/Daan, and her occasional glimmers of visions that originate from Qui-Gon’s memories of him, or from Bant’s, have only ever revealed a blur of close-cropped chestnut hair. But Tahl has felt his features with her hands until she knows his face by heart; his brows so often furrowed in concentration or concern, his straight nose, the cleft in his chin.

Obi-Wan tried to describe himself for her once, after she had once told him teasingly that she rather suspected he might be quite good-looking, if noses were anything to go by. _Just an average face, Master,_ he protested. Her fingers unerringly find the cool remnants of tears on his unshaven cheeks.

“Oh, my boy,” she says, and pulls him into her arms. Obi-Wan puts his head on her shoulder and takes several shuddering breaths. It’s easier for a boy to cry when no one can see him, she thinks; that must be why Obi-Wan has always sought her out whenever he is upset, slipping into her quarters to tell her whatever he could not bring himself to say to his master, spilling his tears on her tunics. As he does now.

Finally Obi-Wan pulls back, drawing his sleeve over his face. Tahl can tell by the way he shifts his weight that he is embarrassed. 

“Obi-Wan,” she says as gently as she can. “I heard what happened.” Meaning, _There’s no need to have to speak of it all over again_. She has laughed over the years about how she has had to learn to speak an entirely new language for Qui-Gon and his padawan, who so rarely say what they mean. “How is he, right now?”

Obi-Wan collects himself. “He was just taken out of surgery to finish replacing the cloned tissue he received on Naboo. Now the healers have put him in a healing trance.”

Tahl steps closer to the bed. Qui-Gon. Her fingers are cataloging the feel of him, the soft, sleeveless tunic he has been dressed in, the warmth of his bare arm, the unwashed hair pulled out of his face in a loose braid. When she runs her hands down the braid, she can sense a memory, not Qui-Gon’s but his padawan’s: _Careful fingers braiding back his master’s hair_ — _gentle, don’t pull_ — _I can do this one task for him, at least._

Tahl bends over him, careful not to disturb the breathing mask pressed to his face or the equipment attached to his chest. “Qui-Gon,” she greets him, and kisses his forehead. He does not move. 

Tahl keeps her hand on his unresponsive arm as she turns back toward Obi-Wan. “How can I help you?” she asks. “Do you need rest?”

He takes another shuddering breath. “I don’t know.” She interprets that as, _No, I don’t want to leave my master._ Qui-Gon’s shadow, Adi Gallia had called him once, and it had stuck. Even as a boy, Obi-Wan had always followed his master everywhere. And Qui-Gon, for his part, had never attempted to dissuade him. 

_I left him behind once,_ Qui-Gon had admitted to her once. _I promised myself I would not do so again._ And so he had not—even though other masters made a practice of taking their own separate missions, even though Tahl herself has left Bant behind at the Temple time and time again, despite her padawan’s objections. 

“I’d like to stay here with him, if I can,” Obi-Wan says unhappily. “But the Council—I don’t know. They aren’t pleased with him. I don’t want to get in the way of his plans. But, Master Tahl, I think he might need me now.” 

She is suddenly conscious of that other, unfamiliar light, flaring bright as a comet curving in space on the edge of her senses. It’s not Bant’s silvery glow, nor is it Obi-Wan’s luminous, golden presence, nor their friend Garen’s coppery spark of energy and mischief.

“Obi-Wan,” she says. “I heard there was a boy.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There had been moments, when she had brushed against Qui-Gon during a practice spar, or while swimming at the lake, when she had a flash of a vision. Not the past, but of what might come to be. Rough hands brushing her hair off her neck, her bare foot sliding down his leg. These possibilities frightened her, and she had found herself drawing back from Qui-Gon, despite his muted, bewildered hurt that she should not want to see him. 
> 
>   
> I am a Jedi, Tahl had told herself fiercely, I know my own path, and the journey to knighthood does not allow for divergence. And surely the Force wished for her to become a knight, to be of some use in that way, the goal of every Jedi initiate and padawan. 

**_then._ **

At times, Tahl might receive a flash of insight into the past; in other instances, she might be granted a glimpse into the future. Her Forcesight, Master Jocasta had called it, with a dry chuckle. 

There had been moments, when she had brushed against Qui-Gon during a practice spar, or while swimming at the lake, when she had a flash of a vision. Not the past, but of what might come to be. Rough hands brushing her hair off her neck, her bare foot sliding down his leg. These possibilities frightened her, and she had found herself drawing back from Qui-Gon, despite his muted, bewildered hurt that she should not want to see him. 

_I am a Jedi,_ Tahl had told herself fiercely, _I know my own path, and the journey to knighthood does not allow for divergence._ And surely the Force wished for her to become a knight, to be of some use in that way, the goal of every Jedi initiate and padawan. 

In her heart, she had been aware that it was not the promise of an unexpected detour that worried her so much as the possibility that her path in the Force led somewhere other than knighthood. Her visions contained such certainty: Rightness, and a feeling of being lifted above herself, viewing all her own worries and concerns as if from a great, soaring height. If this feeling was not of the Force, if it did not come from the Jedi path, then what was its origin?

“Is it possible to change the future?” Tahl had asked her master once, once the last Jedi left and the Temple archives had gone quiet. At the close of day, she often assisted Jocasta in returning the used holobooks and datacards back to the shelves of the archives. Over the years, it had become a quiet time for Tahl to speak to her master without interruption, and Tahl had grown to treasure the silence of the archives in this twilight hour. “I know all the masters say the future is always in motion, but is it really?”

Jocasta stopped in the midst of her shelving to consider the question. The blue light from the holostacks turned her hair almost white, and Tahl had been struck by the thought that this is how her master would appear when Jocasta was old. 

“I have to believe the future can be shaped, altered by our daily decisions,” Jocasta said at last. “I chose to accept that it is the case. But as for proof, I have none. And yet—consider your book of endings. The same story, told many ways, a different ending each time, each new resolution written hundreds of years after the original story came into being. Scholars have studied the progression of those stories for centuries, attempting to pinpoint the smallest detail that might have been the key to altering the story. In some cases the key is impossible to determine—and yet the story changes anyways. Does that answer your question, padawan?”

“Yes,” Tahl told her. She slid a stack of datacards into their correct location on the shelves, catching a quick Force-glimpse of orbweavers spinning an intricate labyrinth of webs across the desolate halls of an abandoned Temple, shelves overturned and manuscripts scattered, floors coated in dust; perhaps many centuries in the future. She flicked dust off her fingers and shook the vision away. “I think it does.”

* * *

**_now._ **

Obi-Wan takes her down the corridors of the halls of healing, leading her to an exam room on the main level. The pneumonic door hisses open, and she hears the rustle of his cloak as he crouches down, his voice emerging from knee-height.

“Hello, Anakin,” Obi-Wan asks. “How was it?”

“It hurt,” says a child’s voice. “My shoulder, where they took the transmitter out. It still hurts.”

“Never mind,” Obi-Wan says bracingly. “I’ve brought someone to meet you. Anakin, this is Master Uvain, a friend of Qui-Gon’s.”

“Oh,” says the boy. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Anakin.” And Tahl finds her hand taken in a handshake, and her Forcesight springs to life. 

_Fury, rage, despair, blasting in her face like the hot sand of a desert wind; the shadow of two battling figures, outlined in red, a flourish of darkness to overtake the light._

The vision fades as quickly as it had come, leaving her slightly shaken. Could this be a warning from the Force, a potential future of some great darkness? But the present must be tended to right now. There will be time to worry about the future. Tahl schools her face, retrieving the smile that had slipped away during her Forcesight. 

“Hello Anakin,” she replies. “I have heard quite a lot about you. You’ve shaken up the entirety of the Jedi order—a feat you share with your future master, young one. The Temple is never so exciting as when Master Jinn arrives.”

“I don’t _mean_ to be exciting,” Anakin’s voice responds. “It just sort of happens to me. Qui-Gon said that was the Force.”

“Ah,” Tahl says. “That would be how he would see it.”

“Is Qui-Gon awake yet?” Anakin asks. There is a plaintive note in his voice, and Tahl finds herself recalling her flash of Forcesight from earlier, this same child’s voice crying out for someone familiar.

“Not for quite a while,” Obi-Wan’s voice answers roughly. “You’ll know as soon as I do, Anakin, if anything should happen.”

“So what do we do now?” Anakin wants to know.

“You will find, Anakin,” Tahl says, as gently as she can, “that the Force often asks us to wait.”

* * *

Tahl takes them to the small tearoom just off the atrium of the halls of healing. It is a quiet place where healers take their breaks and where others wait. There are private corners covered off with painted screens as well as a conservatory, with walls and ceiling made from glass. Tahl can remember visits to the halls of healing from her childhood in the Temple, how the reflection of the potted plants strung in front of the lighted glass creates patterns of greenery on the honey-colored marble floors. She finds a small corner table near a window, where she can feel the light on her face. 

She settles Obi-Wan and Anakin there, then returns with a steaming pot of tea and several cups. Anakin takes his cup carefully from her; she can sense his anxiety over holding such a fragile thing. 

She can tell that Obi-Wan is already slumped over the table. Tahl slides his teacup in front of him and touches his elbow. 

“Thank you, Master,” Obi-Wan responds. He takes a polite sip from his tea before setting it back on the table. Then he drifts into a light sleep, lulled by the sounds of water from a nearby reflection pool. 

“Do you like your tea, Anakin?” she asks.

“I think so,” he replies. Tahl translates that response automatically as _No, not at all._ He is hardly a Jedi child, she thinks with amusement. His fear and grief cannot be soothed by a cup of tea. Well, there is one thing Tahl has learned from having her own padawan—that the best, and first, thing that one should do for an unhappy child is to feed them. 

“I have often found that young boys require a great deal of nourishment,” Tahl begins. “You might go and see what you can find that you would like to eat, and bring it back here.” She instructs him on how to navigate the task of ordering food, then sends him off to try his luck with the serving droids. 

“Yes, Ma’am.” The sound of feet on the tiled floor of the tearoom speaks of the boy’s eagerness. 

Obi-Wan remains hunched over his cup, his breathing deep and slow. She sips her tea and lets herself give into worry, over Qui-Gon’s fragile state, over Obi-Wan’s distress, over Anakin’s situation, over her unsettling warning from the Force. Master Jocasta had always told her, _Water is bound to run the right way._ Her master had not worried about the shape of things to come. Her concern was in the past, and how it shaped the present. 

Water runs downhill, Tahl thinks. The Force might naturally choose the smoothest course, just so, and therefore there is nothing to fear. But people are not so easily directed as water. A being must make so many choices throughout its life, and each choice presents branches of opportunities and consequences, and further possibilities beyond those. Tahl herself has always been too stubborn, too headstrong; she has made so many uphill decisions in her own life, ignoring the advice of her friends and mentors. She could never be accused of allowing the Force to move her like water.

Then she hears the chair scraping as Anakin slides back into the seat across the table. “What all did you choose?” Tahl asks the boy, and Anakin describes his tray to her. 

“Juma juice, barabel fruit — I don’t know what this is, but it looks okay — some kind of meat, scintero peppers, and I’ve never seen anything like this, but I think it’s _dessert_.”

She smiles at the delight in his voice. “Obi-Wan had a sweet tooth when he was younger, just like you. I could always bribe him to come help me in the archives with a pastry or two.”

“Obi-Wan?” Anakin asks, perhaps a trifle doubtfully. “But he’s so serious. He couldn’t have been anything like me.”

Tahl rests her chin on her hand. “More than you know.”

She lets Anakin eat, but once the clattering of a utensil on the plastiod tray informs her that he is finished, she places both hands on the table and steeples her fingers together. “Now,” she says, and she can feel Anakin’s sudden attentiveness directed at her. “Tell me what all Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were able to do for you, before you came here.”

He shifts in his seat. “Obi-Wan found me some clothes. The right kind, like you all wear here. You know, nice things. And Padme’s ladies cut my hair and gave me a bath. That’s all we had time for on Naboo — then we got on the medical frigate with Qui-Gon and came here. I don’t know much else. Obi-Wan keeps me near him, mostly, but he never tells me anything important.” There is a current of resentment in his voice. 

“Knowledge is power,” Tahl remarks. “It is difficult, when you don’t know what will happen. Anakin, we will try to find out more information for you. Perhaps that will help.”

“I didn’t think there was much you could tell me. About what will happen to me. Or Qui-Gon.”

“No, I cannot tell you those things,” Tahl agrees. “I cannot determine your future. But perhaps we can settle you for tonight.”

She grips Obi-Wan’s shoulder and squeezes slightly, and he stirs, raising his head.

“Obi-Wan,” she says, “Am I correct in assuming that no amount of coercion will separate you from your master tonight?”

He almost laughs. Tahl considers that a victory. “That is correct,” he replies.

“Then I will take charge of Anakin, if you’ll let me.”

Obi-Wan yields with obvious relief. His voice, when he speaks, is gravelly with exhaustion. “Thank you, Master.” 

“Come, Anakin,” she says, rising from their table. “It’s late.”

* * *

Anakin walks through the Temple at her side. Tahl keeps a hand on his shoulder, for his benefit rather than her own. She can feel Anakin’s flickers of emotion like sparks leaping from a fire: His anxiety for Qui-Gon, a deep unhappiness over his precarious position among the Jedi, his nervousness of saying or doing the wrong thing; and every now and then a burst of anger at being made to feel like an outsider, not wanted, when Qui-Gon had _said_ — 

“Anakin,” she says, and she can hear the way his hair brushes against the collar of his tunics as he glances up at her. “You are with me,” she says briskly, “and I am a knight of the order. No one will question your presence in the Temple while you are with me.” 

She feels his startled surprise at her words. The tension drains out of his shoulders under her hands. Not all of it, but enough. “Okay,” Anakin says. He adds, belatedly, “Thank you, Master.”

“Tahl will do, for now,” she replies. 

“Shouldn’t I call you Master?” Anakin asks. “It seems important.”

“I think not,” she says, considering. “There are other words, words that mean the same thing, but that do not have the same connotation to you. We can surely find one. In the meantime, you can just call me by my name.”

Anakin squirms under her light touch. “It sounds disrespectful,” he objects. “It doesn’t feel right.”

She finds herself thinking of her fairy tales. There had been one story in the collection about a child who had wandered, lost and alone, until she found a teacher in the heart of an ancient forest. “All right,” Tahl says. “We can try this, then. _Ama_ , from the Old Alderanian. It means teacher.”

“All right,” Anakin says, sounding relieved. “Ama.”

Anakin isn’t wrong — she can sense the curiosity directed at them — but neither is she: No one stops her to ask about Master Jinn’s ward. Perhaps it’s true, what Obi-Wan had once told her frankly, _I wouldn’t dare ask you even a holocron call number, when you look like that._

Tahl wonders briefly what sort of look she might be projecting right now, and if it is exclusively for Qui-Gon’s benefit — _and he doesn’t quite deserve it, oh, that man, the things I will say to him when I meet him again._

Tahl pauses as they leave the halls of healing. What should she do with this strange boy? She considers Qui-Gon’s empty quarters, then rejects the idea. She winds up taking him back to her own rooms. 

Anakin explores her quarters restlessly. Tahl hears him move closer to the miniature fountain in her quarters she had placed there for Bant; the rhythmic ripple of the cascade abruptly changing to a trickle as he sticks his hand under the water and lets it run through his fingers. 

His footfalls stop at the door to the second room in her quarters, and the door lets out a pneumonic hiss as it responds automatically to his presence. He must wonder about the room’s emptiness, because he asks, “Do you have a student?”

“I did,” Tahl tells him. “Knight Eerin took her trials last year.”

“Oh,” Anakin replies moodily. _Oh dear,_ Tahl thinks, realizing her misstep, and then, _For star’s sake, Qui-Gon, how have you pulled me into this?_

“Anakin,” she says. She can feel the way his head snaps up at her tone. “What do you think is going to happen to you?”

Her awareness of him suggests a shrug. “I thought Qui-Gon would be my master. That I would be a Jedi. Now—I don’t know. He looked so weak, when I saw him.”

“Qui-Gon is strong in the Force,” she says briskly. “He will recover in time, I am sure.”

A choked-back sound. Tahl can feel his fear, unreceeding. She places her hand on his head, and she can feel the way he drops his chin to his chest.

“All is well in the Force,” Tahl murmurs, though Anakin will not understand the meaning, and despite the fact that she is no longer certain of anything that is to come, she remains sure of that. 

* * *

_**then.** _

Master Jocasta had found her in the basement of the archives, hiding away with the T’rilla collection. Her master’s carefully wound hair had been bound up by a pair of Ansata sticks, an acknowledgement of Jocasta’s dedication to enlightenment, but stray hairs were beginning to fall around her temples, softening her face. 

“Oh, my padawan,” Jocasta sighed. “So you made your choice.”

Tahl had raised her head and fiercely swiped at her eyes. 

“I cannot stand to lose him. He is my oldest friend. But I want to live,” she said. “I want more than one life, Master, I want as many as I can have. And that is why I must stay in the Order.”

“That doesn’t mean it does not hurt,” Jocasta said softly, and when tears welled up in Tahl’s eyes again, her master sat down beside her and pulled her head into her lap, and she stroked her padawan’s hair until she stopped crying.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leave space for the Force, Jocasta had told her. Fill yourself with too many of your own desires, padawan, and you will leave no room for the Force. Tahl had meant to honor her master’s teachings. So she turned her attention to the book of endings she had always loved so. She was determined to unravel the thread that bound the stories together before her knighthood.

_**then.** _

As Tahl neared the end of her apprenticeship, she had spent more and more time with the special collections, in the deepest level of the archives. Her master had not told her so, but she sensed an ending approaching, and Tahl wanted to be ready, her tasks finished and assignments completed in preparation of the unknown, so that she might face the future after her trials with an open heart and mind. 

_Leave space for the Force_ , Jocasta had told her once. _Fill yourself with too many of your own desires, padawan, and you will leave no room for the Force._ Tahl had meant to honor her master’s teachings. So she turned her attention to the book of endings she had always loved so. She was determined to unravel the thread that bound the stories together before her knighthood.

Tahl spent her evenings in the special collections room, keeping the archival lights at their highest setting long past the hour when most beings had retired for the night, reading over the familiar stories again and again, puzzling over the stories and writing down her thoughts on pieces of flimsy, crossing out one theory and circling another to try out the next day.

Her master had clucked her tongue but allowed her padawan free rein over her time. Jocasta, who possessed the master key for the archives, would not leave the key with any other Jedi, no matter if the Jedi in question were council members or revered masters. But she would stay in the archives until Tahl was finished, citing a need to run diagnostics on the collection development software, or a batch of new materials to process that could not wait until the next day.

“Haven’t found your thread yet?” Jocasta asked one night, after Tahl had stumbled up from the special collections room late into the night, rubbing her forehead and blinking away the remaining spots of bright light on her vision. “I would have thought you’d unraveled that book several times over by now.”

“Not yet,” Tahl had admitted. “Sometimes I think I might have a hint—but it never seems right. I did think there was a connection between the thranta that spoke with a human’s voice and the princess whose tounge dripped gemstones instead of words. Perhaps something to do with language, storytelling.”

“You might be right,” Jocasta agreed. She stood up and collected her personal datapads and cloak, dimming the archive's lights to a silvery glow. “What does the Force tell you?”

“It tells me nothing, master.”

“Perhaps,” Jocasta remarked, locking the archives’ doors behind them, “perhaps you have not yet given the Force enough room to work its marvels.”

* * *

**_now._ **

Morning bells chime, rising Tahl to wakefulness. She pauses by Bant’s door on her way to the kitchenette, but when she presses her ear against the door, she can only hear the light breaths of a sleeping child. 

Tahl doesn’t wake the boy. No doubt he is still affected by subspace lag. She sends a message to Jocasta that she will be late arriving to the archives, and another to Obi-Wan to inquire about his master's condition, and what she should do with his boy. 

She makes a cup of tea and drinks it at her low table, idly listening to the sound of the fountain, then rises and makes another. It is good to have another being in her quarters. Since Bant’s knighting, emptiness has been collecting in every corner of these rooms. She has found ways to keep herself busy this past year, taking on more research projects and additional duties with the Council of Reassignment. 

_I had thought you would never allow another in your quarters, let alone your heart,_ Qui-Gon had teased her once after she had taken Bant as a padawan. 

And she had replied, thinking of her master’s words, _I found I had to make room first._

Anakin rouses himself sometime after her third cup of tea. She hears his slow-moving footsteps stumbling out of Bant’s room. “What time is it?” he asks without preamble. His voice is gritty with sleep.

“Time,” Tahl says to the chrono on her wrist, listens, and repeats the answer back to him. “Just after ninth bell. Still morning here, if that’s what you want to know. Why, is there somewhere you need to be?”

“No,” he says, and flops down on her couch cushions. “Have you heard from Obi-Wan?”

She has, in fact. “Qui-Gon is not yet awake. Obi-Wan says you might continue to stay with me, if you’d like.”

“Okay,” he replies. She cannot quite tell from his voice what he truly thinks of that. His voice is flat, accepting but without an indication of his actual feelings, and Tahl wonders if that is the trained response of a being born into slavery.

“I have some new clothes for you to wear here,” Tahl says, indicating a stack of garments the requsions droids had brought up to her rooms the previous evening. “There is a ‘fresher down the hall, would you like to clean up?”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Anakin devoutly, and dedicates himself to the ‘fresher for some time. Tahl listens to the taps being made to switch to every setting, and grins.

When he finally emerges, Tahl asks, “Would you like to accompany me to the archives today? I do have some work to check up on.”

“Okay,” Anakin says. There is no mistaking the lack of interest in his voice now. “I guess that’d be all right.”

“Oh, the enthusiasm of youth,” Tahl remarks, and feels Anakin’s sheepish presence radiate through the Force.

* * *

“This is where I work,” she tells Anakin once they arrive. “The Temple archives.”

She leads him through the intricate corridors of the archives. After Melida/Daan, she had not required her visual impairment droid to navigate these halls; the archives have been as much her home over the years as her own quarters. She has spent the years of her apprenticeship with Jocasta here, assisting Jedi with research and filing away chips and crystals of information on the shelves. 

She takes Anakin through the Third Hall, with its collection of star-maps and planetary reference material and steers him between the holobanks that glow with faint blue light, past the quiet carrels and study rooms, until they reach her usual workroom, deep in the heart of the archives. Anakin remains just inside the threshold while she activates TooJay.

“Is that your droid?” Anakin asks, with the first real interest he has shown yet. “I thought Jedi didn’t have possessions.”

“That is TooJay,” Tahl says with a grimace, “and she’s not a possession, really. She’s supposed to assist me in my work at the archives.”

“Sir Tahl,” TooJay says melodically. The droid’s voice modulator buzzes too quickly in a rapid-fire monotone; TooJay has needed that modulator repaired for years now. “How may I be of service?”

“TooJay, for what is possibly the thousandth time, I am a female,” she grumbles. She can feel Anakin’s spark of excitement. 

“I think I could fix that...if you don’t mind.”

Tahl smiles. “Go for it.” Over the years, she has developed a sense of movement around her. Not vision, not quite the Force, though enhanced by it. More like a sense of shadows, movement without finer details. She can tell that Anakin’s hands are moving quickly, rerouting wires and adjusting circuits inside TooJay’s programming. Then Anakin snaps the protective plate back into place on TooJay’s neck. 

“There,” Anakin says. He sounds pleased. “I think she’ll sound better now.” Then he hesitates. “But you don’t really need her, do you?” he asks. “I think I can tell.”

Tahl laughs. “No, I don’t need her. But just between you and me — ” she drops her voice in a whisper, and she feels Anakin lean into her side to hear her words- “I’ve gotten rather used to her. She makes for decent company when Bant’s away.” 

Tahl gives the droid instructions to fetch her collection of datapads and crystals from the stacks, then finds her way to her desk and browses through the clutter. She offers Anakin a datapad from a stack of multiple devices, then shows him a handful of data crystals nestled in her palm.

“What are these?” he asks. 

“This is my work,” she tells him. “I am a researcher and data compiler for guardians on active missions.”

“You work here, all the time?”

“Sometimes. Other times I work in other spots in the archives, or in the Senate. Sometimes I take some text back to my rooms to work on in the evenings.”

Anakin seems mildly impressed. “That’s a lot of data crystals. Is it all research?”

“No. Some are my own reading material.” She feels through the stack until she finds the correct crystal, feeling the raised markings imprinted on the crystal’s surface with the tip of her finger. “This is a history of Rodian theater that I have been reading along with Master Windu. And this is a replica of a collection of old Alderaanian fairy tales, and here's a collection of historical accounts of voyagers on Setti IV.”

She inserts the last crystal and holds out the datapad. “I thought you might like to read while I work.”

Tahl can feel his tentative hand take the datapad, then pull away. Then he deflates. “It’s in Basic,” he says blankly. 

She prods him gently with the Force. “Is that a problem?”

“I can only read Huttese,” he says. “Slaves aren’t supposed to read or write — we’re not bought for that. But my master taught me some Huttese. He thought I’d be more useful that way.”

For a moment, cold fury washes over her. _I am a Jedi master,_ she reminds herself, and releases her fury back into the Force. “Not to worry,” Tahl tells him. “Here.” She takes the datapad back, and pulls up a translation program to convert the text from Basic into Huttese. “What about this?”

She can feel him looking at her. Then his attention goes back to the datapad. She can sense how he uses the Force unconsciously to pick up on patterns, to enhance his understanding. A bright child, and powerful in the Force. 

“I can read it, I think,” Anakin says. “I mean — most of it. Almost all of it.”

“I have always found a good story takes your mind off your troubles,” Tahl says.

“You mean like a diagnostic manual?” he asks blankly. “Or a diagram?"

“Not a manual,” she says, her brow furrowing. “Haven’t you read a story before?”

“A story?” he asks. She can hear the skepticism in his voice. “Of course not. Slave, remember.”

“I thought you said your master had taught you to read.”

“Huttese,” Anakin says. “Nobody ever wrote a _story_ in Huttese.”

“Factually incorrect,” Tahl informs him. “There are several hundred thousand Huttese novels and plays cataloged in the Archives.”

Anakin makes a derisive noise. “Not any good ones, though.”

Tahl snorts. “A compelling point.”

Anakin hands back the datapad. “Thanks anyways,” he says politely. Tahl can sense him touching the other crystals on her desk. “What’s this?”

“Ah,” she says, touching and recognizing the crystal he is holding. “That is my translation work. Not my job, really, but I do enjoy it in my free time.”

“Why do you need to translate?” Anakin asks. “Aren't there programs to do it for you?”

“It’s not quite the same,” Tahl says ruefully. Translation is work she has always enjoyed. There is artistry to the work, an element of creativity that she brings to the process. The text is more than words on a page; she brings her own personality to the task, her own sense of the fitness of things. There are times when a literal translation will not do; the text would lose some of its meaning, and she must cast about for a phrase or word that will call up the same emotion or image as the original. It is like teaching a student, she has come to believe; finding out what methods help a child learn best. She tells Anakin as much, and perhaps he believes her. 

“You can use that crystal. Let’s see what you know,” Tahl invites him. “You might read the first page, and we’ll see how you get on with it.”

“All right.” Anakin sounds dubious at best. But he does as she suggests and obediently begins to puzzle out the words in front of him.

They spend some time in quiet reflection, Tahl checking over her datafiles, Anakin quietly struggling with his lesson.

“And who is this, padawan?” A dry voice, crackling like paper, a familiar sound from her youth. Tahl smiles. 

“A new scholar,” Tahl replies. “Anakin Skywalker, this is my master, Madame Nu. She is the head librarian here.”

“A pleasure,” her old master says. “And what are you reading, young scholar?”

The click of the screen as Anakin passes his text to Jocasta. “Ah, the voyages of Sythase. A thrilling tale, no doubt, but hardly appropriate for his age.” Her master slips away, responding to the call of another Jedi.

Tahl can sense Anakin’s distinct lack of interest grow into intrigue. She smothers a smile. There were few Jedi who got on with Jocasta’s sense of humor. _The best way to get a student to read a book is to tell them they oughtn't_ , her master had said once. There had been a decided spark of mischief in her eyes as she said it. 

Certainly it works on Anakin. The thunk of elbows on the table, the quiet clicks of the screen as he flicks through the pages, apparently lost in the illustrations. Tahl smiles and settles down to work.

Hours pass by in the quiet room.

She hears the chime of the bells and realizes abruptly that she has kept them here far longer than she had intended. And there is still the question of where to take the boy from here. She gathers up her datapads and instructs TooJay to file them away in her carrel, then she gently shakes Anakin’s shoulder to wake him out of his light doze. 

“Come,” she says, as gently as she can. “It’s getting late.”

* * *

**_then._ **

On the eve of her trials, Tahl had found herself in the traditional white robes of a prospective knight, kneeling on the floor of the special collections room. She had not opened the book of endings. She only looked at it, and tried to clear her mind, attempting to clear enough space to let the Force work.

Morning came with no answer.

Jocasta found her there as the Temple lights began to burn brighter, drawing them into daylight. She felt Jocasta’s light touch on her shoulder. “Illumination eludes me,” Tahl told her master wryly.

“That does not mean you are not ready for knighthood,” Jocasta reminded her. “Perhaps you will never find the answer you are looking for. Seeking should be it’s own reward, padawan.”

Tahl carefully touched a page with one gloved finger, then hovered her finger lightly over an illustration, following the path of a vine that curled around the Old Alderaanian lettering at the head of the page. “Perhaps this book is what I must let go of,” Tahl said. “To allow the Force room to work.”

Jocasta’s fingers tightened on her shoulder, but she said nothing. 

“Have you found the thread?” Tahl asked. Her master had combed over the fairy tales as thoroughly as Tahl herself has over the years, though she has never spoken of her conclusions with her padawan. 

Jocasta smoothed a hand over her hair, then gently traced the length of Tahl’s padawan braid with her fingertip, charting the journey of interwoven threads and beads to the tail. “Yes,” her master had replied. “I think I have.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In their shared quarters near the tower of the Council of Reassignment, Jocasta had told her tales of her missions as a young knight, tracking down and recovering lost Sith artifacts. Tahl would sit at her master’s feet and hug her knees to her chest, listening to the stories. 
> 
> There was a blue-white that cut across her master’s face that had fascinated Tahl, a scar Jocasta had received during her work as a Shadow. She had refused to tell Tahl the details of how she had received the scar. 
> 
> “A story for another season,” Jocasta had said, and instead, her stories were of painstaking work at archeology sites and expeditions to recover lost manuscripts from the former Jedi waystations scattered across the edges of Wild Space. 

**_then._ **

In their shared quarters near the tower of the Council of Reassignment, Jocasta had told her tales of her missions as a young knight, tracking down and recovering lost Sith artifacts. Tahl would sit at her master’s feet and hug her knees to her chest, listening to the stories. 

There was a blue-white that cut across her master’s face that had fascinated Tahl, a scar Jocasta had received during her work as a Shadow. She had refused to tell Tahl the details of how she had received the scar. 

“A story for another season,” Jocasta had said, and instead, her stories were of painstaking work at archeology sites and expeditions to recover lost manuscripts from the former Jedi waystations scattered across the edges of Wild Space. 

“I wanted to dedicate my life to recovering artifacts, so that the Order would have the knowledge and resources they needed to continue the fight against the evil of the Sith,” Tahl’s master told her. “You cannot fight the enemy without understanding how their history intertwines with our own.”

The stories had inspired a kind of hunger in Tahl for that kind of life, and in her own dreams, she pictured herself as a Jedi knight, reclaiming lost texts and exploring the ruins of worlds long left unseen. 

“Why did you leave your work behind?” Tahl asked one night. She could not understand how her master had traded her work for their quiet life together in the archives, reshelving holobooks and answering reference questions, taking notes at meetings with the Council of Reassignment. 

“Ah, that is one of my favorite stories,” Jocasta had replied. “I had a student come to the archive day after day, asking questions, never content to simply learn about a subject from holobooks or a master’s explanation—she must learn for herself, every lesson. And I thought I might be interested in a different legacy.”

“I don’t see how you could stop,” Tahl mourned. “All your work, all your adventures. How could you give all that up?”

Jocasta had smiled. “You’ll know when you take a padawan of your own.”

Tahl was not sure that she would. In her Forcesight, she had seen visions of a future to come, and she felt sure that her work would be to prevent these events from unfolding, a daunting prospect.

“Why does the Force tell me such things?” Tahl had asked her master about her psychometry. “Why me, and not some other Jedi, a master who could understand, one who could use these visions to change the universe for better?”

“The Force gives us these gifts,” Jocasta replied, as any master would reply. “It is not for us to ask why.” A standard maxim straight from Master Yoda, but Tahl knew Jocasta was a researcher, a thinker—a questioner. And if even she could find that a suitable answer, then perhaps Tahl ought to consider the virtues of surrender.

But Tahl had not been sure. Her visions made her feel helpless. Therefore she worked to shield her heart against vulnerabilities.

The years passed, Tahl guarded her heart. She remained a solitary knight, long after her agemates took padawans of their own. 

Qui-Gon had been one of the first of their agemates to choose his first student, after tutoring another knight’s padawan in Ataru, until Feemor’s trials and subsequent knighting. “And when will you be taking a student?” he had inquired.

“There will be no students for me,” Tahl said crisply, and Qui-Gon had frowned. 

“You deny yourself much joy,” Qui-Gon said in reply.

The Council, she knew, would like her to take a padawan, though they had not said so in so many words. It was at their bequest that she had taken the padawan Orykan with her to Telos IV on that ill-fated mission that had proved to be Qui-Gn’s padawan’s undoing. 

Orykan, a young padawan, had witnessed her master’s death not so very long ago. She was sent with Tahl to assist in retrieving records from the archives at Telos IV. Jocasta had been the one to tell Tahl of her assignment. 

“I don’t know what to do for a grieving child,” she had told Jocasta sharply. “I haven’t the skills to heal her. I won’t know what to do, what to say. Select another Jedi for this mission, master.”

“You will know what to say if you allow the Force room to work,” her master had said. “The secret to comforting is to sit with another in their grief.”

Orykan had suffered from nightmares, waking up every night on the flight to Telos. Tahl had held the girl through her tears, she had stroked her lekku until she quieted, and then put her back to bed. 

Her hands brushed against the girl’s robes, and she had a flash of Forcesight: A master taking a killing blown meant for his padawan, his unseeing gaze, a child crying over him; the Force had spiraled across into the future and hinted at night after night of anguish and despair.

I cannot be what a grieving child needs, she had thought then, and when she returned to Coruscant she had told the Council she would not accept a padawan. She had seen Qui-Gon tear himself up over Xanatos’s insecurities and anxieties for years.

“Perhaps it is for the best,” her master had said to her, after the mission debriefing. “If you are not ready, then you are not ready. But padawan, I do wonder if the Force is trying to tell you that you are meant for more than you deem yourself capable of handling.”

Tahl thought of the voyage from Telos, their shared quarters, Orykan’s heartache and tears. The Force could not have brought them together for any reason beyond chance. 

When Qui-Gon returned alone after Telos, she had slipped away and gone to him, but his grief would not allow him to hear her words. So she sat with him in silence, by the lakeshore that they had always loved. 

She had looked at his bleak features and thought, This is what the Force warned me against. 

* * *

**_now._ **

She rounds the threshold of Qui-Gon’s room, one hand on Anakin’s shoulder. She can hear at once Qui-Gon’s heavy mechanical breathing, unchanged since the day before. The scrape of a boot and rustle of cloaks, and Obi-Wan is coming toward them. 

“Master Uvain,” he says to Tahl, and then, bending over Anakin, “Hello, Anakin. What all have you been up to?”

But under her grip on his shoulder, Anakin, is craning his neck to look toward the still figure lying in bed. “Qui-Gon’s not any better, is he,” he asks, voice flat. 

Obi-Wan sighs, and stands back up. Tahl can hear him rubbing at his jaw. “Not yet.”

“I know,” Anakin says in that same flat tone. “I could tell before we came in, that there’s less of him here.”

She feels Obi-Wan’s grief, so carefully contained. “He is diminished greatly,” he answers. 

“Is he dying?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan says honestly. “I hope not.”

“Can I stay here with you?” Anakin pleads. “Not even all night. Just for a while.”

“All right,” Obi-Wan agrees. “Just for a while.”

Tahl takes her hand off his shoulder, and Anakin’s footfalls step towards the bed. He stands there. Tahl can hear the way his hand smoothes the edge of Qui-Gon’s tunic. 

Tahl sits next to Obi-Wan, quietly talking about nothing in particular, until Anakin steps away from the bed. She stands up and holds out her hand. She can feel Anakin’s questioning look through the Force, and Obi-Wan’s answering reassurance. 

“Go on, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. “I’ll be along soon, to check on you,” and slowly Anakin moves away, and back to her side.

* * *

Anakin is quiet back in her rooms that evening. He does not ask her the questions she might have expected, and goes silently to his bedroom. 

Tahl sits up after he goes to his room. She is thinking of Orykan, as she often has over the years. She has learned something about grief and comfort since then.

She hears Anakin crying in his room that night, an almost imperceptible sound, even to her trained ears, but his transparent misery echoing through the Force. 

She slips into his room and sits on the edge of his bed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Tahl asks him, and Anakin shivers. 

“Not really,” he says, and shudders again. “Not any of it. I don’t think I can sleep.”

“I don’t think I can either,” Tahl admits.

“You love him,” Anakin says. “Qui-Gon. I think I can tell that, too.”

Tahl gives him a slight smile. “He is my dearest friend,” she answers, as she has for many years. 

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” Anakin asks. “That’s what my mom always did for me, when I couldn’t sleep. No one reads books on Tatooine, not like you do here. Our kinds of stories, you just tell them. Like my mother. She would tell me stories, things that happened to her, all about other planets,” he adds wistfully. “She wasn’t born on Tatooine, my mother.”

“Tell me a story about her,” Tahl says, and Anakin leans against her side and tells her about his mother, her dark hair and hands worn rough from work, about her songs and the sound of her laughter when Anakin would tumble into their home covered in sand and with stained palms and knees from the ochre-colored dust from exploring the rock formations near the slave quarters. Tahl can almost see her, the way Anakin describes her, a dark-haired woman with lines around her eyes. Is it only the way Anakin speaks of his mother, or is she catching a glimmer of his memory? She can’t be sure.

Anakin tells her a story his mother told him, about the kryat dragons that live in the wastes of his home planet. There was a kryat that had grown so enormous that it had taken to eating the children of the villagers who lived nearby, until one brave mother, a slave, had gone to slay it, and instead found a treasure trove of kryat eggs, mirror-bright and gleaming with emeralite-green scales, so valuable that when she had sold them, she was rich enough to buy her freedom. 

“I always liked that story,” he says. Anakin’s voice seems to quiver, and Tahl remembers how Obi-Wan would come to her in her quarters, in tears but never acknowledging them, only the crack in his voice giving him away. “I don’t know why.”

Anakin drifts off, lost in thought. Tahl lets his head continue to rest against her side, and strokes his hair gently. She finds herself thinking of how she had once soothed Bant this same way, and Obi-Wan as well. She has always thought she was not suited to be a master. Too independant—too focused on her own missions, her own way of serving the Force. How could she come to care for a child, a stranger to her? 

But you cannot hold a child while they cry and not come to love them, she has come to believe. Obi-Wan had been the one to teach her that, a lesson she hadn’t even known she needed to learn, before she could kneel in front of a tiny Mon Cal child and request to be her master. And for that first lesson he had taught her, he has carved out a place of his own in her heart.

These children, she does not know who she was before they came into her life. What colors she lacks in her vision, she has found in Bant’s silvery laughter and Obi-Wan’s quiet, golden adoration. Bant’s recent ascent to knighthood has left her — not quite lonely, a Jedi can never be lonely in the bustling Temple, filled with life and the Force. But she rather thinks she has dreadfully missed being necessary to someone.

“My mother used to sing a lullaby to me,” Anakin says eventually. “I never knew what the words meant. I don’t know if she even knew. I don’t know where she came from before Tatooine. We never talked about it — she never wanted to talk about it.”

He speaks out a few lines that rhyme. “Do you know the language?” he asks. His voice is full of hope. 

“No,” she admits. “But I am a researcher. We can find out.”

Anakin’s voice is quiet. “I wish she could know where I was—that I’m all right.”

Tahl taps her finger against her chin thoughtfully. “You could send her a message.”

She can feel Anakin shake his head. “Where would I send it? We didn’t have a transmitter in our quarters. Besides — slaves can’t read, remember?”

“You could be the one to teach her, someday.”

Anakin is astounded. “As a Jedi? A _Jedi_ could do that?”

“Not all Jedi spend their days fighting,” she laughs. “Look at what I do. I teach, and work in the Archives. We could find a way to get a message to your mother, I’m sure.”

“Qui-Gon never mentioned that,” Anakin says, perhaps a trifle resentful. 

“Well, Qui-Gon had other things on his mind. He was under a great deal of pressure, you know, to do what the Chancellor asked of him for Naboo. And there were so many complications, and other considerations. I know he meant to do his best for you.”

Anakin is quiet for a while. “It’s funny,” he says at last. “I used to dream of being free, everything I would do once I could. And now all I want is to go back home.”

The tears come again, unremitting. 

She strokes his hair until he falls asleep, and when she is quite sure that he will not stir, she rests his unresisting head on his pillow and covers him with a blanket.

* * *

Obi-Wan comes to her door late in the night, long after Anakin has fallen asleep in the extra room. He goes to the chair where Tahl is sitting and sits at her feet, resting his head against her knee.

“Healers kick you out?” Tahl asks him.

“They took him back for another round of bacta.”

“How is he?” Tahl murmurs, and Obi-Wan takes a deep breath. Oh, she knows how to translate Obi-Wan’s silence. Her heart sinks. 

“He’s still alive. That’s enough. The Force and his stubbornness will do the rest.” But Obi-Wan’s voice is rough.

“I’ll go stay with him tonight. You should rest.”

Obi-Wan shuffles uncertainly. She can hear him scratching at his chin, a soft rasp of fingers against days of stubble. “How is Anakin?” he remembers.

“As well as can be expected. He misses his mother. Qui-Gon. You.”

She hears his sigh, and her heart twists. He is pulled in so many directions. “You may stay here tonight, Obi-Wan.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Qui-Gon will need you, when he wakes up.”

“He won’t need me, then. He’ll need healers, and masters.”

“Obi-Wan, he has always needed you. Even if he cannot bring himself to tell you. I’ll tell you for him.”

He lets out a hoarse gulp of laughter. “How do you know?” 

“I speak Qui-Gon Jinn,” she says wryly. “A rare dialect indeed. And besides, Anakin will need you well-rested. He has quite a lot of energy, like most boys I have known.”

Another sigh, and Tahl knows she has won. 

“What will we do without him?” Obi-Wan asks. _What will I do without him_ , Tahl hears.

“If we should lose him, if the Force is calling him home, then we shall go on,” Tahl tells him. “But I want to keep him here, for my sake.”

“For all of our sakes,” Obi-Wan replies.

* * *

**_then._ **

After leaving Melida/Daan, Tahl had woken up in the halls of healing, unable to tell if it was day or night. All she knew was her master’s voice like crackling leaves, reading stories out loud, legends and myths from the book of Old Alderaanian fairy tales, until she drifted off back to sleep.

When she had recovered enough to remove the bacta patches, she had touched the wounds on her face, now healed over after her treatments. She not received medical care in time to prevent the wounds from scarring, or to restore her vision. She felt along the raised scars on her face, touching them gingerly, realizing how the scars cut through her eyebrows and down over her cheeks. 

Her master had sat with her, and Tahl remembered Jocasta’s pale blue scar. 

“You never told me how you got your scar,” she murmured. 

“You were not in the right season to hear it then,” her master had said. “But you are ready to hear it now.”

Tahl leaned into Jocasta’s side and pressed her head against her master’s shoulder, a position she had not adopted since she was a padawan of twelve, and she began to listen. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Tahl had first lost her sight, it had been the Old Alderaanian fairy tales that she had wished desperately, the stories as familiar to her as the nursery songs sung in the creche. Her first night after being released back to her quarters from the halls of healing, Tahl had groped her way through her new universe of darkness towards her desk, her hands searching through crystals and holocards but unable to locate the right one. 
> 
> Qui-Gon had come to her door, and she had not been able to turn him away that time, she was so hungry for his presence. He had read her the stories out loud when she could not sleep, unable to tell day from night.

**_then._ **

When Tahl had first lost her sight, it had been the Old Alderaanian fairy tales that she had wished desperately, the stories as familiar to her as the nursery songs sung in the creche. Her first night after being released back to her quarters from the halls of healing, Tahl had groped her way through her new universe of darkness towards her desk, her hands searching through crystals and holocards but unable to locate the right one. 

Qui-Gon had come to her door, and she had not been able to turn him away that time, she was so hungry for his presence. He had read her the stories out loud when she could not sleep, unable to tell day from night.

She had been touched by his devotion, even after so many years of separation, even after that last day as young knights when she had turned him away. And in the years that followed Melida/Daan, Qui-Gon had grown to be a part of her daily life again; missions and debriefings, his voice a constant presence in her messages, his padawan slipping through her door asking to borrow a stick of orlish for their meal. 

Tahl, quite without meaning to, found Qui-Gon to be a regular aspect of her days, an essential element in her life once more. Even after New Apsolon, and the words she had spoken to him not long after their return.

A cup of tea by her hand, Qui-Gon’s quiet breathing across the table. She had been so weak still, from her captivity, she could only manage to sit up for short amounts of time. 

“Have you thought any more about what I asked?” Qui-Gon had asked.

She had clutched her tea cup tightly in her hand so that the tea would not splash. Her hands had been shaking, though she had known for some time how she would answer him. “I had.” Her voice was steady. “I had thought that Bant is still so young. That I would like to see her knighted. That this is a charge I cannot give up.”

A long silence.

“Obi-Wan is young as well,” he answered eventually. “This is for the best. I will trust in the Force on this matter.

“I agree,” she says. Impulsively, she had reached out and caught his sleeve. “Qui-Gon-”

“You are my heart,” he said. “That will never change, Tahl. My devotion to you...”

She had stopped his voice by taking his hand. Her eyes had ached with tears. “I know.”

Tahl knows endings. She had read many books, after all. And what is an ending but the beginning of something new?

She could hear the smile in his voice. “Perhaps, after all this time, we might try just being friends.”

* * *

**_now._ **

She leaves Obi-Wan drifting off on her couch and Anakin sleeping deeply in Bant’s room, and makes her way to the halls of healing. 

The halls of healing have a soft, padded sensation to them in the Force, like being wrapped in a cloak; with so many beings injured and in pain, the healers maintain a tight dampening down in this area. 

The door to his room lets out a pneumonic hiss as it allows her entry. The hum of the machines that breathe for him, the slow tick of monitors, and beyond that, the Force-driven sensation of healing crystals arranged around the room, directing energy carefully through his body to aid in his own efforts to heal.

Tahl draws her chair up close to him. She feels a thick lump of grief lodging in her throat. She has already given Qui-Gon up, not only once but again and again. How could she give him up this way, when she still has not yet learned how to give him up in any other way before?

She finds herself thinking of those nights after Melida/Daan, so long ago now, when Qui-Gon had come to read to her, his rich voice rumbling through her quarters. She has worked so much on those translations that she could have recited each fairy tale by heart, but hearing those familiar stories in Qui-Gon’s voice, she had learned something new. Not of the stories themselves, but of what it means to be devoted to another being. 

She still has never unwound the thread of the book of endings.

Tahl remembers Anakin’s stories of his mother, the tales she had shared with him, a connection that remained even though Anakin’s mother is far away, perhaps never to be seen by him again. And she thinks of her master’s voice, telling her again and again, that comforting is in the wait. 

Tahl slides the crystal into her datapad and, running her fingers across its surface, begins to read out loud. 

She tells Qui-Gon of the story of a child, abandoned in the glinewoods of Aldera, where the white pine trees grow up the sides of the mountains, and how the child had wandered for many days and nights before finding a teacher in the soft light of a meadow high on the mountaintop. She tells him of the thranta who had nursed a dying human princess back to health, and would not be separated from the princess afterwards, learning to speak with a human’s voice, and possessing such wisdom that the princess took the thranta for her advisor when she became queen, and her rule was long and made Alderaan bountiful and prosperous. How when the queen stepped down, she left the palace alongside the thranta, and they lived north of the valleys by a lake filled with blue water clear as a crystal. 

And in the way that all revelations come, her book of endings unravels quietly. 

Love, in the teaching and learning both. Love, as a connection binding stories together. 

Tahl has learned something new from each story in this collection, a new perspective or line of thinking to consider, and therefore she has come to love them for all the lessons they taught her.

Love is the greatest teacher, she has started to believe, and Qui-Gon has taught her so much, lessons she had been adamandant that she did not wish to learn. He has taught her the footwork used in Ataru forms, how to propagate a miliflower, how to open one’s heart to a padawan, how to accept a love she had not believed herself worthy of being offered. 

Tahl breaks off from a story. Water flows downhill, she thinks, and her eyes ache with unshed tears. The Force whispers that it is easy to surrender, even such a stubborn one as herself.

She strokes Qui-Gon’s untidy hair, falling out of the braid Obi-Wan had so carefully woven. 

“You still have so much to teach me,” she says to him.

There is no translation for what her heart is telling her.

_ I should have told you in every language I have ever learned,  _ Tahl whispers close by his ear,  _ how very much I love you. Wake up, so that I can finally tell you. _

* * *

She sits with Qui-Gon through the night, telling him of love in every language she can speak.

* * *

Tahl is there when his breathing changes, and he begins to stir. She cannot see Qui-Gon’s eyes open, but she hears his voice, thick with disuse, hoarsely calling her name. 

  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tahl is at his bedside when Qui-Gon awakens again. 
> 
> “You are an absolute fool,” she tells him, not unkindly. 
> 
> To his credit, Qui-Gon does not argue with her. “I was sure you’d be along presently to tell me so,” he says hoarsely. “Now you’re here, so we can begin. Let’s have it, Tahl.”

**_then._ **

After Melida/Daan, Obi-Wan’s young friend Bant had been pulled into her orbit. Qui-Gon had liked her, and made a bit of an assistant of sorts out of her, asking her to run errands and to come along on his walks through the Temple.

Tahl had bribed Obi-Wan and his friends to assist her in rearranging her workroom in the archives. It had pleased her to hear their young voices in that quiet space, Obi-Wan’s quiet mirth and Garen’s uproarious laughter, and the silvery voice of their friend Bant. 

The boys had been given other responsibilities after several days of work, both under the instruction of masters with active mission rotations, but Bant, unspoken for, had remained, helping her sort through shelves and set up voice recognition controls. Until her work space began to feel quite empty without the girl’s presence. 

She had gone in search of Bant one day. There was a gentle tugging, encouraging her down a certain hall and then towards a certain room. Tahl had taken a deep breath and allowed herself to trust the feeling, to let it guide her. She found the girl in a quiet meditation room.

“I have missed you,” Tahl told Bant. “I haven’t seen you in some time. What’s kept you away?”

She knew that the slow, airy breaths coming from the girl were indicative of her distress. “My friends have all left,” Bant said finally. “I’m the last of my clan here at the Temple- the only one still here. And I miss them, I do.”

“I know that feeling,” Tahl admits. “It hurts when Qui-Gon leaves on a mission, when I know that I cannot do the same. Waiting is a difficult process, Bant. I thought perhaps you and I might pass the time together.”

A watery gurgle from Bant, a chuckle perhaps, Tahl thought. “I’d like that,” Bant said wistfully. “I know that I shouldn’t wait, that I should accept the moment for what it is. But I still haven’t been chosen for a padawan. And after all that’s happened, I can’t imagine that any master would choose me now.”

The Force seems to ring close by her ear. _Me? Oh, stars and planets._ Tahl shakes her head, astounded. But Qui-Gon has always been right about one thing — when the Force is leading you down a path, the only possible way to learn where it might take you is to follow it. She reaches out the Force, and takes all the courage she can pull from there.

“I would,” Tahl says, and feels the rightness of those words. “Bant Eerin, would you be my padawan?”

“But you don’t want a padawan,” Bant says softly. “I know that you don’t—you’ve said so before.”

Tahl puts her hand out, feeling around until she finds Bant’s webbed hand, slightly damp and cool to the touch. A flash of Foresight—laughter like silvery bells, running far into the future, and Tahl guiding her padawan’s hands as she gripped her saber. “Then do me the honor of being the one to change my mind.”

* * *

**_now._ **

Tahl is at his bedside when Qui-Gon awakens again. 

“You are an absolute fool,” she tells him, not unkindly. 

To his credit, Qui-Gon does not argue with her. “I was sure you’d be along presently to tell me so,” he says hoarsely. “Now you’re here, so we can begin. Let’s have it, Tahl.”

“That boy is far too powerful for his own good—completely miserable—” Tahl tells him, “—and worse, functionally illiterate.”

“Who? Anakin?” Qui-Gon asks, bewildered.

“No, your other apprentice,” Tahl replies wryly. “And that brings me to my next question. Qui-Gon, what were you _thinking_?”

“That Anakin would not receive education nor happiness as a slave,” Qui-Gon answers. He struggles to sit up, seems to think better of the idea, and gives up rather gracelessly. “That Obi-Wan has earned his knighthood. And I feel rather like I am paying for all my sins at the moment. Dearest Tahl, haven’t you any sympathy for me at all?” he says plaintively.

“Perhaps a little,” she replies. She has to fight against the tears that sting her eyes. He is so dear to her still. “As a matter of fact, I am furious with you. Please do not get yourself impaled again.”

“I will do my best,” he replies dryly. “It was hardly an experience worth repeating.”

“I presume you did this just for the attention.” Tahl smoothes back his hair, to ease her words. 

“Oh, certainly.” 

She does not quite know how to say it. She says, abruptly, “Qui-Gon - I am going to ask Anakin to be my padawan learner.”

Qui-Gon does not respond for a long moment. Then he begins, heavily, “Tahl—” 

“It’s not for you, or in spite of you,” she tells him. “I think I can do him some good. I need that, Qui-Gon, more than even I have realized. Teaching Bant taught me many things. I had never thought to take a padawan, until I met her. I did not think I had anything to offer to a student, damaged, as I thought I was.”

Qui-Gon makes a protesting noise. She puts a finger against his mouth to silence him. “Not that I am—but that was how I felt. And now I feel like I still have more to offer.”

It’s a small movement, almost soundless. But in the quiet of this room, she can hear the way his eyelashes brush against his cheek, once, then again. She can sense his relief.

“And what am I to do then, since you are rearranging all of our futures?” Qui-Gon grumbles. 

“Recover,” she answers. “So that you can stand on your own feet to cut your padawan’s braid at his knighting ceremony.”

She can feel his head turn away. “Impossible,” he says gruffly. “It will be months before I can get out of this damned bed. And the way he fought that Sith — Tahl, he’ll be knighted for it within days. They’d be fools to hold him back longer than that.”

“Obi-Wan could have been knighted a dozen times over since the Stark-Hyperspace war,” Tahl says. “You’ve waited this long to propose the idea to him. What’s a few more months, if it means you get to be there?”

“When was I supposed to do it?” She can hear the way Qui-Gon scrubs his hand across his beard. “You are right. He has been ready for months. Years, even.”

“Of course he is ready,” Tahl tells him. “Obi-Wan is steadier and more capable than knights with twice his age. But you are not.”

She can hear his sudden intake of air. 

When he speaks, his voice is rough with grief. “I do not wish to hold him back. Particularly not now. But, Tahl, how am I supposed to do it at all? He is—he has been everything to me. How am I supposed to give him up?”

“It is not a shameful thing, Qui-Gon, to love another being,” Tahl says, as gently as she can. “Surely you know this.”

“How can I ask that of him?” he asks harshly. “Such a selfish thing, to keep him by my side, just to ease my own struggle.” 

“Obi-Wan has told me he wants to stay with you. See you recover. He knows he’ll be placed on the active missions roster as soon as his braid is cut.”

“He doesn’t know what he wants.”

“And you do?”

“He deserves better than to be kept from knighthood again, on account of my folly. He ought to be off on his own, fulfilling his potential. I don’t want him held back for my sake, Tahl.”

She feels as though she can almost hear the words in his heart, translated into language. “I know,” she says. She understands his meaning, perhaps better than any other Jedi could. “But have you asked him what he wants? He loves you. As I do.”

Qui-Gon is silent for a long time. Slowly his hand creeps out over the blankets and grasps hers. Then she feels him turn his head and cough. “Tahl,” he says, when he has recovered his breath. “When you leave, could you send him in?”

She bends over to kiss him lightly on the forehead. “Of course.”

* * *

The next day she takes Anakin to the Room of a Thousand Fountains, and shocks him by removing her boots and socks in order to walk barefoot across the grass by the edge of the lake. 

“No one else is doing this,” he says nervously.

“Well, that is their prerogative, Anakin. We are all entitled to our mistakes. Let’s show them what fools they are.” And she had stepped into the reeds and mud at the edge of the shore until she was covered up to her ankles. 

She can hear Anakin hesitantly removing socks and boots and then sloshing around the lakeshore nearby. “You went to see Qui-Gon without me today,” he accuses her. “Can I see him soon?”

“Soon,” she promises. “You and he will have much to discuss, I believe.”

Anakin seems to consider her words. “Will he still be my teacher? Has the Council changed their minds?”

She will have to be careful, with her answer. “I don’t know, Anakin,” she begins. “I’m not sure what will happen, to him or to you. But I can tell you what I think will happen, based on what I know of how the Council works, and what the healers have told me. Bear in mind that I don’t know anything for sure. This is only speculation, between you and me.”

“Okay. That’d be all right, I guess.”

  
  


She wades back towards the shore, sits on the edge of the lake and keeps her feet in the water. “First,” Tahl says, “You are part of the Order, even though you are not a padawan. You were left in Qui-Gon’s care, and that makes you a ward of the Order. You will not be asked to leave the Temple. The Council may allow you to be taught under a master, as Qui-Gon wanted. But,” she continues, her senses sharply picking up Anakin’s distress, “Qui-Gon may not be able to teach you himself.”

“But he said-” Anakin objects.

Tahl holds up her hand to quiet him, and Anakin snaps his mouth shut with an audible snap. “He will need time to recover, and heal. It may take longer than even the healers think. And in the meantime, you would need to be taken care of, and Qui-Gon will not be able to help you. It stands to reason that another master may decide to take on your training.” 

Anakin is absorbing all this. “What if I don’t want anyone else but Qui-Gon to teach me?” 

“A Jedi accepts the path the Force provides,” Tahl answers reflexively. Anakin makes a scathing noise. 

“What does that mean?”

“It means—accepting your circumstances, even if they aren’t what you particularly wanted.”

“That just sounds like being a slave,” Anakin points out.

“I never liked that saying,” Tahl admits. “What the point really is, Anakin, is that you have a narrow area where you can make choices, no matter what circumstances you find yourself in. And the trick is to see that. It can be hard, because sometimes you really feel like you don’t have choices, and other times you just don’t want to make a choice - you want to have a choice made for you.”

“You sound like my mother,” Anakin tells her. “She would wake me up every morning, and tell me that today was a day that we were alive and together, so we were going to make the best of it.”

“Your mother sounds like a wise woman,” Tahl says. “She taught you well.”

His voice turns wistful. “I just thought I would get to be with him. With Qui-Gon. I don’t want to be with someone I don’t know.”

“Well—you know me,” Tahl says stoutly. “I could teach you, if you’d like.”

His voice is incredulous. “You? You’d do that?”

“Surely it’s not so terrible as all that,” she teases him. 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Anakin rushes to reassure her. “I just- I hadn’t thought of it, before. What would you teach me?” His voice is wary. “I mean. You don’t do the same things that Qui-Gon does.”

“No, I don’t,” Tahl admits. “But there are many things that I do that he cannot do. Things I could teach you.”

“Like reading?”

“And other things.”

“About the Force?”

“That, too.”

“I still want to fight with a lightsaber. Like Qui-Gon’s,” Anakin says wistfully.

“You could still have a lightsaber. See?” Tahl pats her hip, where her lightsaber rests. “There are many ways to serve the Force, Anakin Skywalker. What do you want?”

Anakin thinks about it. “Freedom,” he answers. “Not just for me—for everyone I know. Everyone I care about. You think I can be a Jedi, and still have all that?”

“Perhaps, in time,” she answers. “First, you’ll need an education.”

* * *

Days later, she can hear Bant’s familiar, beloved footsteps at the threshold of her quarters. 

“My padawan,” Tahl greets her, and she feels Bant’s cool, smooth fingers wrap around her hand. “I am afraid I am about to do something rather upsetting.” 

“Oh dear,” Bant says. “And am I supposed to talk you out of it, or to be supportive?”

“I’m not sure,” Tahl admits. “I have been thinking of taking another padawan,” she says, and Bant’s delighted laughter rings in her ears. 

“In need of company, after only a few short weeks without me? Have you missed me so much, Master?” Bant teases. 

Tahl strokes the back of her hand. “Of course I have - but more than that, I think I might be needed.”

“You have always been needed,” her padawan replies, and Tahl can hear the smile in her voice. 

“For so long, I had thought the galaxy had no more use for me,” Tahl murmurs, and Bant must read the emotion under those words, for she feels Bant’s webbed hand tighten around hers. “And then you came along - and now there is this boy. Bant, it’s criminal shame what they’ve put him through. I can’t stand for it.”

“It’s a good thing you’re here to save the day, then,” Bant says, and then she says briskly, “What all do you think you’ll need from requisitions?” and they sit there making lists and plans, and their tea goes cold long before either of them notice.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What will you do? Tahl had asked him.
> 
> I’ll teach what you taught me, he had answered. 

**_to be._ **

Anakin’s voice comes through the comm, the recorded message playing through her terminal. 

“Ama Tahl,” he is saying, “I’ve sent in an updated copy of my mission logs to the Council, no need to worry, but I thought you’d like a personal report. By the time I'd left for Tatooine, the educational outreach program on Ryloth had made amazing progress — but Aayla will tell you more about that. And as for me — I’ve set up camp in the slaves’ quarters at Mos Espa and have gotten fairly settled in. I couldn’t draw too much attention to myself, but word of mouth is getting around, and I’ve had four more students join. One of my students is one hundred-and-eleven, she says she’ll learn how to read Basic by her next birthday. She has been a slave since she was born.”

Tahl can hear the crack in his voice. “Oh, my padawan,” she murmurs into her cup of tea. Her heart breaks for him. _I cannot look away,_ he had told her after his knighthood, and when she had brushed her fingers against his face, she could feel the tightness in his jaw that threatened his composure. _I must do something._

_What will you do?_ Tahl had asked him.

_I’ll teach what you taught me,_ he had answered. 

There had been a fieldwork position open in the EduCorps. Anakin had accepted the post after his knighting, with her blessing. 

Anakin’s voice crackles with static in her ear. “Don’t worry about me, I’m all right. I’ll be back in Temple soon, there’s only a few more cycles left in this rotation. Don’t let TooJay tidy my room, or I’ll give her a new head.”

“Oh, Master Anakin,” TooJay says, fluttering with alarm.

“He’s only joking,” Tahl tells her patiently. 

“I’m glad I came,” Anakin’s voice goes on, quieter. “I think — I think I’m making a difference here. And...there’s a moisture farmer out past Anchorage. I am traveling out there once I have his location. He has a wife...I think it could be her. 

“It was so strange, how it all came about. I think the Force must have been with me. Ama, let me tell you the story...”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading along on this little au! I love Tahl so very much and I wanted to try to write from her perspective. I hope I did her justice. It goes without saying that writing a visually impaired character when I don't have actual experience with that myself is difficult to do right. If you have any constructive critiques or advice, please let me know!


End file.
